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deeper and deeper into the ravine that opened below them on the right. Soon they were walking halfway between the tree-crowned limestone heights and the tumbling, forested valley from where the now invisible stream, nourished by more and yet more springs on its descent, could be heard rushing and chuckling away. They hardly spoke. At one point Fox turned to Adam over his shoulder and said, ‘It’s good, the fresh air and the sun. Non ?’ sounding about as unthreatening as an aunt at a tea-party, and Adam replied with equal banality, ‘Yes, that’s true.’
    They began to be enveloped by the sounds of the deeper woods. Chiffchaffs had arrived from Africa earlier in the week and were starting to fill the valley with their two-syllable call. Thrushes were singing, but at half power because it was mid-afternoon, and then once or twice the silvery song of a wood warbler raised the musical stakes.
    The valley twisted away to the right. The path now climbed steeply upwards among the trees. In front of Adam, Fox’s muscular legs were working away, the contours of his strong thighs and buttocks intermittently showing in his rather baggy trousers. Then, unexpectedly if you hadn’t been here before, the path reached a sudden summit. Adam and Fox stopped. They stood in a miniature clearing which had a flat floor of young spring grass, emerald green. The path, if they chose to follow it, would turn sharply, almost back on itself, and wind down to the floor of another valley. The clearing lay atop a sharp limestone spur from which the ground now fell away a hundred feet on three sides. A wooden fence, a metre or two in length, stopped you stepping out into space and falling headlong into the panorama below. Side by side, Adam and Fox peered out across the palings. Below them, almost vertically, the rushing stream was visible again where it tumbled over boulders in its drunken haste to meet its confluents in the wider valley that hustled towards the Lac de la Mouche. The view was nothing new to Adam. But this experience was. Contemplating the view shoulder to shoulder with the creature he had decided to call Fox and wondering what precisely would happen next (though he knew in outline) and who would start it. Adam had already assured himself that there was no-one in the vicinity. The limestone cliffs made their position impregnable on three sides; on the fourth the path, arriving from either direction, climbed so steeply that anyone making their way up would be heard approaching minutes before achieving the summit.
    Fox touched Adam’s cheek with the back of his fingers. Adam was surprised at the softness of his touch. ‘P’tit-Loup’, was all he said.
    Adam felt a sudden urge to pee and told Fox this as explanation for why he was so hurriedly opening his own fly. Once he had done that, he thought, the next step was up to Fox. They were still both standing pressed up against the guard-fence and Adam thought that perhaps he could project a hundred-foot waterfall onto the treetops below. He had never seen such a thing and was curious as to how it would look. But he quickly realised, once he had exposed himself, that such aquabatics were out of the question and that the pressure-capped spring that was suddenly desperate for release was not his bladder at all but something else.
    Fox took all this in at a single sideways glance. With a little giggle he undid himself and his trousers dropped, without further persuasion, to his knees. He was in the same state as Adam, though unencumbered with underwear, and as he turned towards him Adam registered his muscular brown thighs as a pleasantly arousing background to what commanded the focus of his attention. Fox threw off his ragged pullover. There was nothing underneath it. His chest was not broad but well shaped nonetheless. It was a soft brown in colour, like the rest of him and almost hairless. On the other hand, a decorative thick plume of dark hair curled its way right up from his